April interrupted her roughly. “For pity’s sake, Zara, haven’t you got anything better to do than fool around in fancy dress? Go and get changed.”
April moved away, steering Mr Monkton down the stairs to the basement offices.
Graham and I were left standing beside Zara.
“But I haven’t got anything better to do,” she told us forlornly. “I’m supposed to keep the kids happy. It’s what I get paid for.” She sighed, replaced her head and stomped across the courtyard dejectedly, her long stripy tail trailing behind her. She disappeared into the education centre and there was a moment’s pause before Mum, looking slightly apprehensive about the weekend ahead, said, “Let’s go and get checked in, shall we?”
The Healing Harmony Hotel and Spa had the hushed, reverential atmosphere of an old-fashioned museum or library, or maybe even a Buddhist temple. It was all polished wood, slate and empty white walls. Wind chimes tinkled gently every time a door opened or closed, and the staff spoke softly, as if scared of disturbing the meditative atmosphere. Mum and Becca couldn’t wait to get on with some serious rest and relaxation. As soon as we’d dumped our bags in our rooms, they both disappeared in search of Mystical Energy, leaving Graham and I to explore. After collecting our information pack from the receptionist, we headed out across the courtyard. A man – presumably Jerry from the maintenance department – had already begun to wash the blood-red paint off the wall.
“Remember S.M.,” I said. “Sounds threatening, doesn’t it?”
“It does have a rather menacing tone,” agreed Graham.
“Sandy Milford,” I mused thoughtfully. “You wouldn’t need to remember him unless he wasn’t around any more, would you?”
“No,” said Graham. “That seems to be a fairly safe assumption.”
“So he’s probably dead. And as Mr Monkton said it was ‘tragic’, I think we can assume he didn’t die of old age.” I looked at Graham. He was trying to avoid meeting my eyes. “We can’t ignore it,” I told him. “We’re going to have to find out what happened.”
Gleaning information about Sandy Milford proved surprisingly easy. The Great British Public were out in force, so there were plenty of people milling around. As far as the staff were concerned, Graham and I were just like every other punter – i.e. totally invisible. Which provided us with plenty of opportunities for eavesdropping.
Everyone who worked in that place seemed to love a good gossip, and the people who had seen the graffiti before it got scrubbed off were having a great time telling the people who hadn’t. For the next hour or so, wherever we went we heard the events of the early morning being told over and over again. In the shop, in the café, by the burger bar – if two members of staff were standing together, they seemed to be having pretty much the same conversation. Each one was marked by the same ghoulish relish, and they all went something like this:
“In blood-red paint, it was. ‘Remember S.M.?’”
“Sandy Milford?”
“Who else?”
“Who did that, then?”
“No idea.”
“Poor Sandy. It was a shocking waste, really it was. No one should die like that.”
“Killed by a tiger!”
“Horrible!”
I glanced at Graham. He looked a little pale.
“It’s his kiddies I feel sorry for. Poor loves.”
“And his wife.”
“Mr Monkton was pretty upset when he saw it.”
“Serves him right. There are plenty of people around here who think it was all his fault. He just hasn’t kept up with things the way his father did, has he?”
“He screamed!”
“He never!”
“Yes, he did.”
“Why?”
“That new girl came up behind him. What’s her name? Zara. She was in that old tiger outfit.”
“I thought they got rid of that after the accident. Didn’t April say it was bad taste to keep it?”
“That’s what I heard. God knows how she ended up wearing it.”
“Someone’s idea of a joke?”
“Reckon so. It made Mr Monkton nearly jump out of his skin. Silly sod. Everyone in the office saw him.”
A heavy bout of sniggering brought each conversation to a close.
“They don’t seem to like Mr Monkton much, do they?” I said to Graham.
“No… And yet the man seems harmless enough,” he replied.
“Maybe that’s the point. I mean, you wouldn’t want someone harmless in charge, would you? You’d want someone who could do the job.” I thought back to the days when my mum had worked for the Town Parks Department. She’d complained endlessly about her boss because he wasn’t “up to it”. She’d left in the end and set up her own landscape gardening business, saying she’d rather live with her own mistakes than someone else’s.
“You could well be right,” mused Graham. “I read an article recently about what voters expect from their leaders. Charisma, intelligence, charm. They like a certain commanding presence; a superior quality. I suppose there’s no point following them otherwise.”
“Well, Mr Monkton certainly doesn’t seem to tick any of those boxes,” I said. “Maybe that explains why he’s not popular. And if he’s not running the place as well as his dad did, no wonder people are moaning.”
By 10.45 a.m. Graham and I knew that Sandy Milford had been a keeper who’d been killed by a tiger about a year ago, but we were no closer to knowing who’d sprayed the graffiti on the wall. And by then we were due to start our fun-filled schedule of Organized Activities.
“We’d better get going, I suppose,” I said, checking my watch. “Where exactly are we heading?”
Graham pulled out the information sheet the spa receptionist had given him. “According to this, we have to meet by the door marked ‘Staff only’, which is right next to the proboscis monkeys’ enclosure.”
“Funny name for a monkey,” I remarked.
“Proboscis means nose or snout,” Graham informed me. “I believe the males’ noses are particularly pendulous. They can grow up to eighteen centimetres long.”
It’s fantastically useful having a walking encyclopedia for a best friend. “I bet you memorized the map, too. Where do we go?”
“This way,” he said.
“And who are we meeting?” I looked over his shoulder at the neatly typed schedule and my mouth dropped open. We were spending the morning with someone called Kylie Milford! I pointed at her name and nudged Graham.
“Well, this is going to be interesting,” I said. “She’s got to be related to Sandy, hasn’t she?”
Graham looked at me and nodded. “I’d have thought it was highly likely. There would seem to be two possibilities. She’s either the dead man’s sister …”
I finished his sentence for him. “…or she’s his wife.”
hot and humid
When we arrived in the Rainforest, the proboscis monkeys were all lined up on a branch fast asleep. Graham was right – even the females had ridiculously large noses, which dangled from their faces like water-filled balloons. The door marked STAFF ONLY was slightly ajar, and through it we caught a glimpse of the keeper we’d seen in the courtyard that morning. She was attacking a pile of fruit with a gleaming knife, chopping it into tiny pieces with savage relish. We stopped in our tracks.
“Do you think that’s Kylie?” I asked nervously.
“Could be.”
Before we could take another step, the stick-insect man loped past us, pushed open the door and went inside. As one, Graham and I glided towards it like shadows, hoping to catch a bit of their conversation.
“Feeling better now, Kylie?” he asked her.
“A bit, yeah. Thanks, Pete.” She sniffed and blew her nose. “It’s silly, me getting so upset. It’s just seeing that writing brings it all back. I’m hardly likely to forget Sandy, am I? I think about him every day. Every minute. He’s always there, in my head. And when I think of the kids…!” She star
ted crying and Pete patted her awkwardly on the back as if he didn’t quite know how to comfort her.
He tried to lighten the mood by saying, “Hey! At least it gave old Monkton a nasty shock. Did you see his face? I thought he was going to die!”
“I wish he would.” The bitterness in Kylie’s voice made Pete drop his arm and take a step back. “He deserves to. We all know what happened. That stupid judge can blame Archie Henshaw until he’s blue in the face. We know whose fault it really was. Look at what he’s done to this place! The man’s a joke. He deserves everything he gets.”
She attacked a melon, splitting it in two with a single blow. Pete flinched and hurriedly changed the subject. “You doing the Behind the Scenes stuff with those kids today, then?”
“Yes.” She checked her watch. “They ought to be here by now. I hate it when people are late.” She glared towards the door and, desperately hoping she hadn’t noticed us eavesdropping, I knocked on it to announce our arrival.
Kylie made no attempt to explain the red-rimmed eyes or pink-tipped nose that clearly showed she’d been crying. Instead she got straight down to business. First she gave us a Health and Safety talk, then we had to don the matching green overalls she handed us, and after that she took us off to the “jungle”. She was pretty much running on automatic pilot, giving the same tour she’d obviously given to loads of kids before us, but I still found it interesting. The problem was, we couldn’t quite bring ourselves to ask her what we really wanted to know: just how, exactly, was she related to Sandy Milford?
The first animals she introduced us to were a pair of Brazilian tapirs – furry pig-sized creatures with what looked like miniature trunks. We watched them over the barrier for a moment or two before Kylie announced that we were going in. I have to confess I was a bit nervous. I couldn’t help wondering how big their teeth were, and Graham looked as though he might refuse altogether. But I took a deep breath and did what I was told, and when Kylie instructed me on where to scratch them (right between the shoulder blades), to my surprise they became absolutely blissed out. First their eyelids started to flutter and then their little trunky noses went all floppy. Then their knees gave way, and finally they sank to the ground with a contented sigh and literally rolled over.
“Brilliant!” I said.
“Extraordinary.” Graham flashed me one of his blink-and-you-miss-it grins.
“Works every time.” Kylie threw a quick smile at the animals.
After that it was time to feed the spider monkeys, who came right up to the wire mesh to take pieces of banana from us with their delicate, bony fingers. Then Kylie took us to a little private room behind the enclosure. In a small cage on the table, a tiny snub-nosed proboscis monkey clung to a large furry teddy bear.
“This is Basil,” she announced, her face softening with almost maternal pride.
“What’s the teddy bear for?” I asked.
“He needs something to cuddle when I’m not here,” she explained. “He was rejected by his mum so I’ve been hand-rearing him.”
“I understand that’s a terribly demanding task to undertake,” said Graham. “From what I’ve read, it seems to be extremely hard work.”
“Yep, it’s pretty tiring. This little fella needs feeding every two hours, night and day. He comes home with me every evening. I haven’t had much sleep lately – but he’s worth it, aren’t you, baby?”
She began to warm his bottle.
“What will you do with him?” I asked as she fed him.
“Oh – he’ll go in with the others when he’s old enough. I’ll keep a careful eye on him, but he should be fine.”
I touched the fur on the top of his head and felt the heat through his paper-thin skin and the tiny, rapid beat of his pulse. “You must be really attached to him,” I said. “Won’t it be hard giving him back?”
“Of course. But he’s a wild animal, not a pet. You can’t go getting sentimental over them.” When Basil had finished his bottle, Kylie lifted him into his cage and he climbed into the welcoming arms of his teddy-bear foster mother. “Anyway,” she added, “he doesn’t belong to me. I don’t get any say in the matter.” There was a touch of anger in her voice so I didn’t ask any more, and then she told us our next stop was the tigers.
“We’re not going in with them, are we?” quavered Graham.
“Yes,” said Kylie.
I gulped. “Is that safe?” I could barely squeeze the words out.
She laughed. “Don’t worry.” She led us to a huge pair of wooden gates that were big enough to drive a lorry through. A small, person-sized door was cut into the corner of one, which Kylie opened. “This is the service area,” she said as we followed her inside. “The bit the public don’t get to see.”
It was a small concrete yard. Cages with old-fashioned iron bars lined the walls. They were linked by heavy mesh tunnels with sliding gates at each end.
“We’ll get the tigers shut in here first, then we can go in to the public enclosure. We’ve had new doors fitted recently: there are at least four of them between you and the tigers. You’ll be fine.” Kylie slid open the one to the public enclosure and whistled. Like trained circus animals, three tigers responded to her summons. With practised ease she threw each one a small piece of meat, and before I’d had a chance to see what she’d done with the gates and tunnels, she had each of them safely contained in separate cages. Even though my conscious mind told me there were iron bars and bolts between us and them, I still experienced a clutch of panic. They were so big. So powerful. I thought of Sandy Milford and felt faint.
“They must be very dangerous,” I said weakly.
“All animals are dangerous if you don’t respect them,” Kylie replied shortly. She thrust a shovel towards me. “Hold that.”
Graham looked as pale as I felt, but Kylie was unsympathetic. She shoved a broom into his hand, dropped a sack of meat into a wheelbarrow and, grabbing its handles, told us to follow her. Before long we found ourselves in the tiger enclosure with the Great British Public on the other side of the glass, gawping and making sarcastic remarks like “Funny-looking tigers!”
“That one’s got no fur.”
“Oi! I paid to see animals, not a pair of kids. I want my money back.”
Kylie ignored their witticisms and led us over to where a wooden pole was sticking out of the ground, as thick and as tall as a tree trunk. Opening the sack of meat, she spiked a large piece with a lethal-looking hook and proceeded to hoist it to the top of the pole on a rope and pulley.
“What are you doing?” Graham was intrigued.
“It’s called environmental enrichment,” explained Kylie. “Keeps them busy. They have to climb if they want to eat. It makes them work for their food in the same way as they would in the wild.”
“Ingenious,” Graham commented approvingly.
When Kylie finished with the meat, she pulled a bottle of aftershave from her pocket. Strangely, mystifyingly, she began to pour it into various holes drilled in the pole. “They like different smells,” she told us curtly. “I vary what I pour in from day to day. It stops them getting bored.”
When she’d emptied the last drops from the bottle, she turned to me and Graham looking faintly amused. “Now it’s your turn,” she said. “Time to do the mucking out.”
Tiger poo is very big and very smelly. By the time Graham and I had shovelled the last of it gingerly into the wheelbarrow, our eyes were watering and we were both feeling slightly queasy, despite the fact it was nearly lunchtime.
When we’d finished the job to Kylie’s satisfaction, she led us back out and performed the reverse manoeuvre with the safety gates. The three tigers sort of flowed with brutal grace back into their outside enclosure.
“That’s your lot, then,” she said briskly. She made no attempt to disguise the fact that she was glad to be getting rid of us at last. “I’ve done my bit. You’re in the Frozone this afternoon, aren’t you?”
Graham didn’t need to check our sched
ule. It was already imprinted on his super-retentive brain. “Yes.”
“OK, then. Bye.” Kylie turned to go. We were dismissed.
It was now or never. “It must be a difficult job looking after tigers,” I blurted out. “People must get hurt every now and then, however careful they are.”
“Well, yes.” Kylie gave me a hard stare. “Tigers sometimes kill their keepers. But the most dangerous animal in captivity is the elephant.”
“Really?” Surprise threw me off my line of questioning. “I thought elephants were quite docile. People ride on them all the time in India, don’t they? I’ve seen it on TV.”
“True. But they kill more keepers than all the other animals put together. The director of Grampian Zoo was crushed to death last year. Sometimes I think…” She broke off, but her eyes had narrowed and her expression had become intense and ruthless. I could almost see the thought rising like a bubble from her head.
Kylie Milford was fervently wishing that Anthony Monkton had suffered a similar fate.
creepy-crawlies
I felt a bit shaky after we’d mucked out the tiger enclosure. I couldn’t decide which I’d found more frightening: the animals or Kylie. She was like a volcano, simmering with heated anger. What would it take to make her erupt?
We had an hour free before we were due in the Frozone, so Graham and I bought ourselves a burger and Coke each and settled down on a bench overlooking the waterhole in the African Savannah. It had been cleverly designed so that the meat-eaters were separated from the vegetarians by moats, electric fences and the occasional see-through barrier. From where we were sitting it looked as if they were all together on the grassy plain: lions, hyenas, zebras, hippos, rhinos, elephants and giraffes. But it was the same here as in the rest of the zoo: the signs were peeling and faded, the glass unwashed, the bench cracked and wobbly.
“So…” I began. “That graffiti means that someone’s trying to upset Mr Monkton. They blame him for Sandy’s death. Especially Kylie.”
“That seems to be an accurate summary of what we’ve heard so far,” agreed Graham.